I had a quick look at the remaster. Honestly with the series graphic style I don't see much different in those but the main change is a better HUD, there are now golden keys and it can run with higher FPS. The original is oddly synced to 62 which resulted in unavoidable screen tearing on my old monitor. I have a 144Hz now, and what I played has mostly run at that rate.

The dumb thing with all this business with Epic is that if all these games were on both stores and Epic genuinely offered some kind of benefit to the actual buyer rather than the bullshit exclusive period thing they've been doing (which just makes me feel hostile toward them) I don't think I'd be so attached to having the game on Steam and might look at them as an viable alternative.

There are some genuine concerns over the security of the Epic platform which steer me away from them, but I'm most pissed about the removal of choice.

So even though Valve has introduced a system to combat them, review bombers have now officially harmed the case for Borderlands 3 and future Gearbox games on Steam. Fucking twats are as bad as Epic themselves.

Both sides are in the wrong, imo. The review bombing is certainly ridiculous, but Randy Bitchford is coming off as a real prick as well, insulting fans for daring to call them out for selling out to Epic, and then apparently somewhere he must have threatened to never release games on Steam again, which would only make things even worse. This whole issue could have been avoided by just releasing the games on Epic AND Steam, but, nope, they were too greedy to do that, and I kinda think they deserve the backlash, even if review bombing is the wrong way to do it.

Randy Pitchford has been pro-Epic since before the store was even open so he's bound to use any excuse to validate Borderlands 3 not being on the biggest PC gaming store, while in another breath he'll be blaming the whole thing on his publisher.

The Epic Store oddly reminds me of this kid I knew in school called James (I wouldn't usually use someone's real name in such a story but since it's a common name and I can't for the life of me remember his surname I guess it's okay and I can't be arsed to think of a fake name for him). Like the Epic Store, James was the 'new kid' in town who didn't have any friends, but did have parents with money, much like Epic has Tencent behind it.

What Epic and James have in common is that they both threw a lot of money around in an effort to buy friends. Where Epic is doing business by cutting rates and paying publishers for exclusives, James made a show of having £20 for school lunch money not just every week, but every single day. £100 per week when in those days you could get a hot school lunch plus drink for around £2 a day. He used this money to gain influence among his fellow pupils by spending most of it on them. He bought his 'friends', same as Epic is buying friends right now.

Thing is, once James felt he had the friends of choice he wanted, he stopped throwing so much money around. This is also much like Epic, which has already gone on record saying it won't be doing business like it has been forever. Which means people like Randy Pitchford may be surprised when Gearbox has it's next game and find that Epic isn't going to throw so much cash around again. He may change his tune about Steam then, once the playing field has levelled again, much like James' so called friends changed their tune when his money stopped flowing. James did not ultimately stay at my school for very long as his parents moved around a lot, but when he left he had no friends left to miss him. Of course it did not help that James was actually a bit of a twat - the kind that let money go to his head - but that kind of attitude seems to have parallels to Epic as well to my thinking.

Morale of this story: you can't buy friendship. Or loyalty. Epic is going to have to throw large amounts of cash at publishers and developers forever now it has set a precedent for doing so, or it will lose what loyalty it has purchased. Publishers aren't going to release on their lesser platform without that cash incentive. They're dumb for ignoring their fanbases as it is, but they'll soon realise it when Epic isn't any more attractive than Steam or any other store. Likewise, even though review bombing is not the way to go (though Exodus players actually did it reasonably okay by actually leaving positive reviews along with dissatisfaction over the Epic Store), Steam players are only acting the way they are because unlike Epic, Steam has actually earned it's brand loyalty. A little thing Randy Pitchford and those like him tend to forget when they're seeing $£$£$£$.

As a final note, I had nothing against James at the time or now. I actually think he was a pretty lonely kid due to moving around a lot, so he likely acted the way he did because it was a quick way to get company for the time he was in one place. In truth, I felt sorry for him. However my friend group were not among the ones he attempted to buy (apparently we weren't deemed cool enough - in those days cool being synonymous with 'disruptive influence') and our attempts to genuinely befriend him were rudely rebuffed.

Honestly I'm starting to feel tempted to never support Borderlands 3 because Randy Pitchford is being such a epic arsehole and seems to have already got Steam's grave dug based on his latest comments and the way he's been blathering on about how competition is best for us, the players without realising that's it's not competition if his game is only on one store. He also seems to think that stabbing his game's fanbase in the back is going to be the best thing to happen to the whole gaming industry in years.

So Prickford (not a typo) logic 101 is basically: 'monopolies are bad, so I'll help break it by creating a different monopoly instead of fighting monopoly properly by making my game available on both stores.'

And I do blame this twat, because he's gone from saying 'don't blame me' to admitting he may have tried to influence the decision. Proves he's a bloody liar to start with.

But he at least had the guts to admit that Epic threw Fornight cash at them, which is more than anyone else. That's literally his only redeeming thing right now.

I'm just sick of devs and publishers trying to to tell their fans that they did this shit for us. Who exactly are they trying to fucking kid here? They did this for their wallets, nothing more, nothing less.

This time last year I may have considered myself a minor PC gaming enthusiast, but I am so fucked off with the industry right now that I just have zero hype for any new game anymore, because Epic is now making us live in dread of the words 'Epic Store Exclusive' popping up just as hype for a game is started to build up. And if anything my animosity toward them is worse because I allowed myself to be duped into getting Metro Exodus for full price just to have it on Steam as I did not want to have to wait a whole year to play it and it ended up being a disappointment. I did actually enjoy playing Exodus but all the behind the scenes garbage and the fact that it was not long enough to warrant a £50 price tag and did have severe performance issues has really soured my opinion of it. I'd have been happy at £30, which will now be the most I ever pay for a new game that doesn't include DLC in the price. Even if it's Elder Scrolls VI. Perhaps especially if it's Elder Scrolls VI, because Bethesda hasn't exactly endeared itself with me since the Creation Club became a thing. Pain in the arse in Fallout 4 and I don't even use the bloody thing!

But yeah, even though I've been replaying Borderlands 1 in the new enhanced version and still loving it (despite some of the obvious flaws NOT being fixed), the Epic Store and Pitchford between them have caused all my hype for the game to evaporate. Same goes for The Outer Worlds, which as a new IP I'm 99% guaranteed to have forgotten about by the time they deign to release it to us second rate Steam players. Walking Dead's final season being moved to the Epic Store as well has resulted in me having no interest in finishing the previous one. Is that one even coming back to Steam? Or is it forever in the hands of those gits at Epic?

I now have zero upcoming games on the radar that I have any real interest in. Rage 2 maybe, but even though it up for pre-order on Steam (still time for Epic to swoop in) I've lost all interest in that as well. I am totally disillusioned with the whole industry right now.

Pitchford should really put his money where is mouth is and make the game available on Epic, Steam and DRM free on GOG and see what happens.

I've read his comments. His vision of PC gaming in ten years looks to be Epic, a bunch of yet to be founded stores, and Steam dead or on the outs. I'm not sure why he's so ready to dig the grave of the store that has sold his games for years and still has a very active player base today even though Borderlands 2, to use the most popular example, is seven years old this year. But I digress, he's promoting a PC gaming experience where we'd need 20+ launchers before we had every game we wanted.

What a clear agenda statement from this dev - how do they know the game sold because it's on the Epic Store if they've added their middle finger to the growing pile aimed at Steam?

Also, Epic just threw down the gauntlet to Valve big time by outright saying that they'd stop all exclusives and even consider releasing their own games on Steam if Valve changes to an 88% revenue split.

I suspect they won't want anything to do with the superhero antics of IV, so it'll most likely end up being a generic crime movie and completely forget to include all the humor from the games. Either that, or they go overboard with the humor and completely forget the crime angle. Either way, I don't see it turning out too well, though I am curious to see what it's like.

I'm not really sure I have much hype for this one. The trouble is with video game movies is that I think I'd find it hard to relate to how they adapted it - especially for games where the main character is custom made by the player. My issue with this one is that I always play the Saints boss as a female and I see maybe 0.1% chance that they cast a female lead in a movie like this. I always found the idea of a female protagonist (anti-hero, rather) in a genre like this made the gangster story of SR2 less generic. I know the player had to be male in SR1 but since SR1 was never released on PC for me the franchise has always started with SR2.

I always had the same reason for always playing Shepard as female in the Mass Effect trilogy. The default male Shepard is a generic as they come shaven headed space marine. A boring stock character. You can obviously change him to your own design, but I always thought changing the character to female instantly made the character more standout in the genre, and Hale's voice acting certainly supported that decision. I think the Mass Effect movie is now either cancelled or lost in development hell, but I'm pretty sure even from early stages they were never going to consider a female lead.

I'll be getting that when the PC version is out, next month. Looks really cool!

Right now, I'm playing the GOTY edition of Borderlands. It definitely feels closer to the newer games, as far as look and controls, at least compared to what I remember it being like before. I beat the base game in well under 20 hours, which is less than I remember from the first time, despite doing basically everything. I did the zombie islands DLC and really enjoyed that one, but couldn't handle the underdome one (as usual, because I almost never like battle arenas) and so far the Secret Armory has been driving me insane with all its annoying driving sections. It's probably my least favorite Borderlands DLC by far, but I've heard it has some good stuff later on, so I'm trying to power through it.

I'll be getting that when the PC version is out, next month. Looks really cool!

Right now, I'm playing the GOTY edition of Borderlands. It definitely feels closer to the newer games, as far as look and controls, at least compared to what I remember it being like before. I beat the base game in well under 20 hours, which is less than I remember from the first time, despite doing basically everything. I did the zombie islands DLC and really enjoyed that one, but couldn't handle the underdome one (as usual, because I almost never like battle arenas) and so far the Secret Armory has been driving me insane with all its annoying driving sections. It's probably my least favorite Borderlands DLC by far, but I've heard it has some good stuff later on, so I'm trying to power through it.

I think Underdome must be played in co-op. At least I've never made any progress with it solo.

I like Secret Armory overall, but yeah, a ton of driving. The biggest (unfixed in Enhanced GOTY) issue with Borderlands 1 DLC is highlighted with this one real bad: only one spawn point in the entire DLC areas! Seriously, they can upgrade the game with golden key functionality and better HUD but they can't be arsed to do something about this major gameplay detraction? Plain lazy if you ask me.

Yeah, that insanely annoying in Secret Armory. In the Zombie Island iit was wasn't much f an issue (in fact, I never even thought about it while playing) because the areas were all interconnected and basically right next to each other, and New Robot Revolution seems to be the same way.

I also found a boss in Secret Armory that was level 61, but I was only level 43, and all missions I have available are 5-6 levels lower than me, so there's no way I could possibly get to a high enough level to even damage it, outside of ridiculous hours of grinding, which I refuse to do. This game's level scaling is messed, compared to 2, where I remember it just setting everything to around your current level, including all DLC stuff. You're probably meant to fight him on a second playthrough, I guess, but I've never really enjoyed doing that, because I'd rather just everything done in one playthrough.

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot create polls in this forumYou cannot vote in polls in this forum